


It All Started

by Deannie



Series: Comfort and Joy and Zombies [6]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombies, Gen, Horror, Old West Zombie AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 03:34:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5481920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s climbing out of the rubble. Out of the fire. Flame licking at her dress like she’s some demon from Hell. Oh God, I think she might be....</p>
            </blockquote>





	It All Started

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first of a series called Cowboys and Zombies, which isn't as light-hearted as it sounds :). Horror, world-building, and period medical stuff will appear in the series. Enjoy. I hope.

My name is Nathan Jackson, and I am a free man. Worked damn hard to get that way and fought through more hell than I ever thought possible. After the war, I landed here in New Mexico Territory and settled down. I ran into people who didn’t care much what the color of my skin was, so long as I’d give ‘em an honest day’s work, and I figured maybe the frontier wasn’t the worst place to be.

I was always one for helping heal people, even back on the plantation, and I always wanted to be a doctor. Got told it was pure foolishness more than once, let me tell you. And it likely is—some folks in the war wouldn’t even cotton to a black stretcher-bearer—but here in the tiny town of Potash Spring, I’m coming closer than I dreamed I could.

If me and Doctor Kimble live through all this, that is.

It all started a week ago. Hettie Myers, three years old and the cutest little girl you ever saw, took ill real sudden after she and her mama got back from visiting family. She got bit by a horse when she was there, but we’re not sure that was what started it. Dead in a day and we never did know how. Her ma said she went crazy there at the end, biting and scratching, so we thought maybe rabies. Her mama Laura fell ill the next day, but she lingered for another four, and she didn’t go crazy or nothing. Just dwindled with a cough and a terrible chill to her skin that left her gray as a corpse before she ever stopped breathing.

Damn strange sight when she sprung up rabid as a cooncat in the undertakers’ the next day. Sheriff finally shot her in the head, but she’d attacked three people and now they’re all sick, too, and six more besides with no idea of where they got it. Another fellow went crazy before he even got sick and the sheriff put him down. Doctor Kimble had the rest of them brought to his house outside of town to try to control the spread, and most of them are just sick and wasting now.

The town is scared. All the rumors about plague and epidemics in California and Arizona got ‘em worried, and the more superstitious people are talking of ghouls and witches and such. Rick Kimble wasn’t real popular with those types to begin with, on account of his Indian bride, and taking a former slave on as an apprentice hasn’t endeared him to them any more. But he’s a good doctor and he’s trying to figure this out and stop anyone else from getting sick. Might be a parasite, he says. He rode over to Martin’s Pines last week and sent off telegrams to some of the doctors he knows in California and Boston, but then all this happened and none of us has had time to go check what they had to say.

The Indian village down the trail hasn’t had a sign of this, and I didn’t want to risk bringing it to them, but they got a weed there that quiets coughs real quick, and some of these poor people… It took me most of the day to get there and the evening’s darkness is making me glad of the well-walked road. I swear I’m buying me a horse when I can afford it.

“Send her out, Kimble!” The angry bellow carries clearly from the direction of Rick’s house.

Shit. Hank McFarland. Bigoted idiot. He’s been agitating everyone, saying Rick’s wife Little Leaf is the reason for all this. She’s cast a spell on the town or some such nonsense.

“Hank, I’m not afraid to shoot—”

Rick Kimble’s threat is cut off by breaking glass, and I run faster. I smell smoke.

“Damn it, Hank, you’ll kill everyone in here!” Rick shouts as more glass breaks and a red glow grows in the night.

“They’re more dead than alive now anyway!” Sheriff Tilly yells. I can hear a too loud grumbling agreement. Lord, is it a mob?

“Yeah,” Hank agrees. “And who’s fault is that!? That Cherokee witch of yours cast a spell on ‘em! I hear tell them Indians are cursing people from here to California.”

Cursing people... You’re a damn fool, McFarland. I race to the top of the hill that overlooks the Kimble house and stop cold. It’s like the Klan burning out the negroes…

Rick’s neat, white two-story house is aflame from front to back. From here, I can see him and Little Leaf in the window of their bedroom on the second floor, his gun aimed at the mob of maybe two dozen people, some townspeople, the rest folks from the outlying ranches. The infirmary is on the first floor, but none of them is well enough to escape, and there’s no one to minister to the sick except the three of us. Jesus, they’re all of them going to burn alive!

“This is insane!” Rick screams out. “These are your friends! Your neighbors! What are you doing!?”

I use the night and my own darkness to dash into the scrub oak at the side of the road, coming around the back of the house. If I can get to the gun box in the shed, I can hold them off long enough to get at least Rick and Little Leaf out.

“Burn out a disease! Isn’t that what you doctors say?” Gillian Markham is a woman with a big mouth and a little brain and too damn much sway in this town. People shout their agreement like puppets. “We aren’t letting this spread any farther, Kimble. It ends here!”

The hell it does. I wrench open the shed and break open the gun locker—Rick can dock my pay later, if we live—and pull out three rifles and a box of ammunition. I also have my knives on my back, which I expect are as good for stopping a man as they are for saving his life. Armed, I head for the back door and find myself flying suddenly into the side of the shed behind me as half the house explodes without warning.

The ether in the operating room. It must have gone up like dynamite. I can hear a long, tortured scream, and damned if I know whether it’s Little Leaf or Rick, but it cuts short as the whole part of the house where their room was drops into the inferno and they’re just gone.

And damned if those _people_ out there in front—the real ghouls—don’t cheer.

“Dear God! Martha!” The cry of surprise cuts their celebration short, and I pick myself up and run around to the front of the house. I freeze for the second time tonight, in a completely different kind of horror.

Martha Paxton is forty-eight years old. Mother of fourteen, though no more than five of them survived the last influenza, she’s been through more than most. And I’m pretty sure she was dead not long after I left this morning. Rick couldn’t get her to drink anymore and the wound in her leg had festered so badly that, if he thought she’d survive, he’d’ve amputated yesterday…

But she’s climbing out of the rubble. Out of the fire. Flame licking at her dress like she’s some demon from Hell. Oh God, I think she might be. And she’s not alone. Jason, Porter, old man Hastings—seven of the nine people we had in there. Alive but not.

Parasites don’t come to mind. Diseases neither. When I was a little boy in Alabama, the old ones would tell tales at night to keep us in our beds and out of trouble. Corpses that rose from the grave to devour the living.

Zombies.

The thing that was Jason Maccabee leaps forward, landing hard on Hank, and the scream Hank lets out finally spurs me into action. I raise a rifle and fire off a shot and the bullet plows through the zombie’s brain, stopping it cold.

Hank’s alive, flat on his back and covered in blood and staring at his arm in shock. There’s a chunk missing just below the elbow. Jesus, he’ll be the next one. Sheriff Tilly shakes himself and shoots Hastings in the head. Martha’s making her way through the crowd and people are firing in blind terror now, hitting each other more than the zombies.

I pray the saner members of our town hold to their houses. If they can stay inside until the chaos winds down, maybe we can contain this. I take out two of them, but they’re faster than corpses should be. Always figured zombies would be lumbering and clumsy, but these are hungry and animal. Smart, too. They’re cornering their prey, pairing off to cull people out of the herd.

It doesn’t take long before the outraged crowd I saw when I crested the hill dwindles to a handful of survivors, shooting whatever’s moving around them as the zombies _feed_. I fight my own stomach to keep it in place.

There are battles you can win, and battles you can’t—a primal scream has me looking up to see Hank rising from the ground and going after Reverend Dawson. This one we can’t win. I squeeze off a few more shots, felling two more of the undead monsters, before they see me as a threat and Hank himself starts toward me, leaving Dawson. I run for the stables—I’ll never make it out of here on foot and I’ve got to warn the town.

Washington, the jet-black stallion Rick was so proud of, stands fidgeting in his stall, Rick’s travelling doctor’s bag is beside his gear, and I gather all of it. “Dr. Kimble ain’t gonna need you anymore, boy,” I whisper to him, tacking him up and mounting. I can hear the bedlam through the barn door, and I fire before I finish settling in the saddle, watching Martha’s body finally drop.

The horse leaps over her as Hank advances. I shoot him, too and push Washington into run, heading around toward the back of town. The carnage behind me is sickening, but I don’t know that anyone in that insanity is going to be saved. I race to Mack Wilson’s house, banging on his door.

“The hell are you doing here in the middle of the night, Jackson?” he demands, rifle in his hand at the abrupt awakening.

“Rick Kimble’s dead,” I say shortly. “About twenty-five people with him.”

“What are you—”

“Mack, I don’t care if you believe me or not, but anyone you see coming from the Kimble place ain’t human. Not anymore.” I shake my head to keep the rest of me from shaking. “Shoot ‘em in the head. Tell everyone else you can to do the same—and then get Greta and the kids and run like hell.”

He gives me a look of clear disbelief, tempered by the two years of friendship we have under our belts and the fact that his youngest would never have made it into the world alive without me there. “Jackson, if it weren’t you—”

“Well it is,” I say shortly. “I’ll head to the outlying houses, you take the ones in town. Tell ‘em all to hole up with ammunition or get away from town.”

He nods warily and I know, crazy plan or not, he’ll back me. A cry that’s damn near a howl sounds from the direction I’ve just come from, and I turn to see Reverend Dawson walking unsteadily down the street. I raise my rifle and Mack reaches out to stop me—until he sees in the moonlight what I already knew. The reverend’s neck’s been half torn out. He’s been dead a while.

“Good Christ,” Mack whispers, crossing himself as I fire and hit Dawson in the head. The body drops and doesn’t rise again.

“What’s happening?” Greta Wilson is suddenly behind her husband at the door, staring at the body in the street in horror. “Mack—”

“Move, Greta,” Mack tells her firmly. “Wake the kids—I need Jimmy and Denis.” He looks back at me, determined. “We got work to do.”

It’s dawn before I meet back up with Mack, and I’m sick at heart by the time I do. The Hendersons are dead—looks like Jake was sick already and turned on ‘em when he died. Their oldest looks to have killed himself. I think I might’ve done the same thing if I was bit. Scary thing is that I didn’t see their ranch hand...

Old lady Yardman wouldn’t budge from her homestead, but she’s got ammunition enough to save herself if the contagion reaches as far as her. The Oldsteins wouldn’t even open the door to a black man, and I don’t know if they cared to hear the warning I was giving.

“We’ve done the best we can,” Mack tells me as the sun rises solidly, showing the rotting bodies of the few zombies who got through the slaughter out at Kimble’s. “I haven’t seen anyone bit, but at least we know what to do if someone gets sick.”

I nod, looking sadly at the exhausted families who’ve congregated in the church. Twelve of the twenty families in the area, and I guess that’s something. I learned in the war that you can’t save everyone...

“I need to go,” I tell him, a sudden thought occurring to me. “I’ll be back.”

Mack follows me out to where Washington stands nervous as hell in the street. “Where are you going?” he demands. “Nathan, come on now, you don’t know what’s out there!”

“Yeah, I do,” I tell him, mounting up and giving the stallion a calming pat on the neck. “That’s the problem.” I turn toward the sun. “I’ll be back. You keep everyone safe, you hear me?”

He nods and I ride out, feeling exposed in the light. Old Crow, the chief of the Indian village, said they hadn’t seen the sickness yet. If I can get to them and raise the alarm, maybe they don’t ever have to. You can’t save everyone, but you can sure as hell try.

And so I ride, Dr. Kimble’s bags full of medicine and supplies banging against Washington’s flank, useless as air. Whatever this is, I don’t think science can stop it.

I’m not sure God can either.

********  
the end


End file.
